In terrestrial digital broadcasting, a frequency band of about 6 MHz in an ultra-high frequency (UHF) band (which will also be referred to hereinafter as a physical channel) is divided into 13 segments, and broadcasting toward fixed terminals such as television receiver sets is performed with 12 of these segments. In addition, broadcasting toward mobile terminals, i.e., one-segment broadcasting (which will also be referred to hereinafter as one-seg broadcasting), is performed with the one remaining segment.
Currently, in the one-seg broadcasting performed as broadcasting toward mobile terminals, the same content as broadcasts toward fixed terminals is broadcast, for which the segment at the center of the 13 segments of the physical channel (the 7th segment in ascending order of frequency) is used.
Here, one-seg broadcasting that is currently performed with the segment at the center (which will also be referred to hereinafter as a central segment) is also referred to as normal one-seg broadcasting.
After a transition from analog terrestrial broadcasting to terrestrial digital broadcasting has been completed, the terrestrial digital broadcasting is performed using physical channels that are called channels 13 to 52 channels of the UHF band.
However, in practice, not all of the channels 13 to 52 are used in terrestrial digital broadcasting in respective regions, and thus there is an idle channel that is a physical channel not used in terrestrial digital broadcasting.
Methods for effectively using such an idle channel have been discussed, and as one of them, performing one-seg broadcasting using an arbitrary segment of an idle channel has been discussed.
Here, since each physical channel of terrestrial digital broadcasting has 13 segments, a maximum of 13 broadcasting services can be performed with one physical channel. A plurality of one-seg broadcasting services that are performed using a respective plurality of 13 segments of one physical channel are referred to as a multi-segment broadcasting service.
Note that one-seg broadcasting that is performed using one or more respective arbitrary segments out of 13 segments is also referred to as arbitrary one-seg broadcasting, and arbitrary one-seg broadcasting also includes multi-segment broadcasting.
In a reception terminal of the related art that receives normal one-seg broadcasts (which will also be referred to hereinafter as a normal one-seg terminal), users perform channel scanning to acquire tuning information that is information relating to tuning to a frequency or the like to perform tuning to a normal one-seg broadcast, and thus a table of tuning information (which will also be referred to hereinafter as a tuning table) is created (for example, refer to Patent Literatures 1 and 2).
In channel scanning of a normal one-seg terminal, a channel of the central segment of each physical channel of terrestrial digital broadcasting is selected (tuned), and when a transport stream (TS) can be received with the central segment, a network information table (NIT) which is a table that includes frequency information of each service for being tuned to carriers on which services are transported and information regarding corresponding services, and a service description table (SDT) which is a table that includes meta information of each service (such as a service name) are extracted from the TS, and then a tuning table is created from the NIT and the SDT.
When a reception terminal that receives arbitrary one-seg broadcasts has been realized, it is also necessary to create a tuning table likewise for a normal one-seg terminal.
Arbitrary one-seg broadcasting, however, is performed with an arbitrary segment among 13 segments of a physical channel, and thus it is necessary to perform tuning to all of the 13 segments of each physical channel, rather than simply to the central segment, which takes an enormous amount of time in comparison to channel scanning of a normal one-seg terminal.
For this reason, a proposal for a method for performing channel scanning in arbitrary one-seg broadcasting quickly (in a short period of time) has been demanded.